Posts Tagged: Paris Review

Although Victor Hugo is best known for his novels, the author had an avid interest in the visual arts as well. However, Hugo didn’t publish his visual artwork, fearful that his drawings might interfere with his literary projects. According to his son’s notes about his father’s process, Hugo would often complete his drawings “with a light shower of black coffee” directly onto the paper.

All that is nonsense though. Write what you like. If you haven’t facts make up with lyricism.

In 1892, Anton Chekhov sent a letter to V. A. Tihonov including a fictitious 200-word bio. 123 years later to the day, the letter has been translated into English by Constance Garnett over at the Paris Review.

With the help of math and computers, a University of Nebraska English professor has been plotting the basic shapes of novels (spoiler: there are six), but this time in a new way. Instead of focusing on plot as action, Matthew Jockers is tracking the positive or negative charge of words to reveal plot as emotional movement.

After a Times article last March criticized Spain (and its literary establishment) for failing to unravel the mystery of the precise location of Miguel de Cervantes’s grave, a reinvigorated search may have finally yielded results. Cervantes was buried in Madrid’s Trinitarias convent, but the specific site was not marked (or not marked well); the discovery of a casket with the initials M.

There’s no denying it, as much as we might wish to: the Northern Hemisphere is in the midst of the coldest part of the year. We temper the icy storms with romantic images of thick woollen scarves and roaring fires and leftover roasted chestnuts, but the cold truth of the matter is, it’s frightfully frigiferous out there.

And when you report back to your own daily world after experiencing the strangeness of a world sort of recombined and reordered in the depths of a poet’s soul, the world looks fresher somehow.

To pay homage to the passing of Mark Strand last Saturday, The Paris Review opened its archive and published a manuscript page of the poet’s “A Piece of the Storm,” as well as some interview quotes and a poem from 1992.

Smart was known, with his “disturbed mental state,” for his loud, feverish, constant praying, and you can read some of that catatonia in Jubilate, with its litany of “for”s and its incantatory quality.

The sound you hear when you put ice cubes into warm (but not hot) water—that subtle but quick crackling—is the sound all around you in the summer fjords near glaciers. There is ice everywhere in the water, the size of your fist and the size of small islands, and because the water is only a few degrees above freezing, the ice cracks slowly, abundantly.

For the burgeoning field of Critical Bibliography, “the study of the physical characteristics of books and the process of bookmaking,” Rare Book School is the highlight of the year. The Paris Review’s Benjamin Breen reports from the annual conference out of UVA, where old-school book enthusiasts gather to share in the examination of woodcuts, medieval manuscripts, and specimens like a gold-edged copy of Encyclopédie with Diderot’s handwritten notes in the margins.

Every year is an abysmal year for books and a terrific year for books. Editors no longer edit, except when they do; publishers care only for their bottom line, except when they don’t; the three-martini lunch is always dead, always quietly continuing.

How does it feel to be in charge of writing about the deaths of outstanding people? Over at the Paris Review, Margalit Fox tells us about her twenty years (and twelve hundreds obituaries) at the New York Times.

Cohen, who turns eighty on Sunday, is exceptionally good at drawing out those moments of sexual crystallization. It’s a skill that, along with his gravelly voice and poems about women’s bodies, has given him a reputation for being a “ladies’ man.” Judging by the adoring crowds at his shows, it’s a reputation he deserves.

In 1906, aged 21, D.H. Lawrence wrote to his future fiancée Louise Burrows with writing advice after reading an essay on art she’d sent to him. Among many other remarkable lines, the British author told Burrows that “[l]ike most girl writers you are wordy” and suggested not being “didactic; try and make things reveal their mysteries to you, then tell them over simply and swiftly, without exaggerating as I do.

The Paris Reviewhas an excerpt from Peter Mendelsund’s book What We See When We Read that questions what we think we know about characters. Mendelsund points out that many of us feel like we know our favorite characters intimately, but when asked about what they look like don’t have specific answers.

Turns out that both Jorge Luis Borges and Jean-Paul Sartre reviewed Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane, and neither of them particularly cared for the film. Needless to say, the director didn’t take this very well.

In celebration of Guy de Maupassant’s 164th birthday, Paris Review blogger Dan Piepenbring revisits his, ahem, seminal story, “Boule de Suif,” about a French prostitute who, like Melville’s Bartleby, would “prefer not to.” Read his coverage here, and the original piece here.

Unaccustomed, vicious, onomatopoeia… We all have that one word we can never spell correctly. Paris Review blogger Sadie Stein’s was “Wednesday.” “It’s like a mental block,” she writes, “or maybe, an increased reliance on technology.” Read the rest of the mini-essay here.

Let’s dedicate this week to the publications, editors, and benevolent marketing gurus who unleashed a whole bunch of quality FREE short fiction to us. Under the shadow of the FCC’s impending decision as to whether or not net neutrality will continue, these all-you-can-read buffets taste even sweeter.

The Baffler has a newly designed website, which includes all of its 25 issues, available for free. With so much talk about the New Yorker opening its digital gates this summer, let’s not forget “the Journal that Blunts the Cutting Edge.” If you need some ideas of where to start, Dan Piepenbring has recommendations at the Paris Review.

Carol Muske-Dukes, a former poet laureate of California, discusses the role poetry plays in modern life at the Paris Review. She considers whether people think poetry is relevant or accessible, as well as how we approach it differently today than we have in the past:

Coming off the holiday weekend, the trusted dispensary of short fiction, Joyland, published “The History of Hanging Out” by Kevin Mandel. Mandel’s story lives up to its title, encapsulating the bundled, sparking energies of a group of young creators.

Should art and literature be treated independently? The Paris Review Daily reports that the British Library has recently released an online collection of 1,200 Romantic and Victorian texts in the first phase of a plan to digitize various literary periods. Notably included is The Yellow Book, a literary quarterly that strictly distinguished between the two mediums.

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